The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

September 13, 2014

Miklós Radnóti (Miklós Glatter)

Miklós
Radnóti (Miklós Glatter) [Hungary]

1909-1944

Miklós Radnóti
was born Miklós Glatter into an assimilated Jewish family on May 5, 1909. At
his birth both his twin brother and his mother died, which continued to effect
his poetry and life until his death, a fact specifically addressed in Ikek hava (Month of the Twins), a prose
memoir published in 1939.

Radnóti began publishing in the
short-lived magazine Haladás in the
1930s, work that co-mingled experimentalism with traditional forms such as the eclogue
and love poems. His first book, Pogáy kōszōntő
(Pagan greeting) appeared in 1930, after which he published several other
volumes, including Ujmódi pásztorok éneke
(Modern shepherds’ song, 1931), Lábadozó
szél (Convalescent Wind, 133), and Újhold
(New Moon, 1935).

In
the same year as the last book, he married Fanni Gyarmanti and lived for a decade
with her in what has been described as a very happy period.

Due to extensive anti-Semitism, Radnóti converted,
like many Hungarian Jews, to Catholicism in 1943. The following year, however,
he was assigned to the unarmed “labor battalion” of the Hungarian Army.
Assigned to the Ukrainian front, that battalion retreated with the Army, his
group being transferred to the copper mines in Bor, Serbia.

In August 1944 Yugoslav Partisans, led by
Josip Tio, advanced, forcing Radnóti’s battalion of 3,200 Hungarian Jews to
march to central Hungary. Most of the group, including Radnóti died on the
force march.

In these last months of his life, Radnóti
continued to write poems in a small notebook, dedicating his last poem to his
friend Miklós Lorsi, who was shot to death during the march.

According to witnesses, Radnói was beaten
to death by a drunken militiaman angry that the author been “scribbling.” Too
weak to continue, soldiers shot him into a mass grave near the village of Abda
in northwestern Hungry, where today a statue commemorates his death.

Eighteen months after his death, the grave
was exhumed, diggers finding poems stuffed into the front pocket of Radnóti’s
overcoat. He body was re-interred at the Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest.